Today marks the 50th anniversary of a flag that has won praise around the world for its bold simplicity.

Prime Minister Lester Pearson, who championed the creation of a Canadian flag, could not have predicted how much passion a leaf between two red bars would come to generate among Canadians.

The flag’s creation marked a turning point in Canada’s quest to brand itself a nation that had stepped away from the apron strings of Britain, says Simon Fraser University political science professor Andrew Heard.

“Just about everyone in Canada identifies with the maple leaf flag, and it has become an instantly recognizable symbol,” Heard says.

In 1996, Feb. 15 was named National Flag of Canada Day. A flag born in turmoil and bitter debate has fluttered into proud middle age.

Here are a few facts and stories about how it came into the world.

PATRICK REID KEEPS FAITH WITH FLAG HE CO-DESIGNED IN 1964

Vancouver’s Patrick Reid needed a few decades to appreciate how good a job he did fine-tuning Canada’s flag.

Reid, 90, is one of a few people lucky to have lived long enough to celebrate a flag he helped to design 50 years ago.

“It’s a wonderful feeling,” he says of his role in completing the flag’s design. “We didn’t really understand at the time the implications of what we were doing.

“It wasn’t until later, when I saw the reaction of young Canadians in particular, that it came to me quite strongly that we had done something rather wonderful.”

Reid was given the task of finishing the flag as head of the federal government’s exhibition commission in late 1964.

He was immediately plunged into one of the fiercest battles of Canadian politics.

Liberal Prime Minister Lester Pearson had proposed creating a new flag to unify Canada, to affirm its independence from Britain and to placate Quebec.

John Diefenbaker, the Progressive ­Conservative opposition leader, fought Pearson and the flag every step of the way. Diefenbaker wanted to keep the red ensign as a way of preserving Canada’s ties to Britain, Reid says.

“And also, in a pragmatic way, he hated Pearson’s guts,” Reid says in an interview from Maalaea Harbor in Maui, where he is vacationing.

Reid’s path to a final design became clearer after George Stanley, a former University of B.C. history professor, proposed a red-and-white design with a single leaf to replace a three-leaf design with blue bars that Pearson had ­initially favoured.

In the midst of the flag battle, Pearson abruptly switched his preference to the single leaf to outfox the Tory opposition.

Pearson’s switch was a good esthetic move, according to Reid. Pearson’s three-leaved flag — which had been dubbed the Pearson pennant — “was just awful from a design point of view. It was too busy,” Reid says.

An irony underlying the flag’s creation is that Reid assigned commission employee and Quebec nationalist Jacques Saint-Cyr to help nail down the final design.

“I chose him because he was the best available designer,” Reid says. “He had some sentiment as a Quebec nationalist but it was a tempered sentiment.

“He had fought in the Second World War with the Royal 22nd regiment, the Van Doos.”

Saint-Cyr set aside his personal sympathies and got right to work.

Reid and Saint-Cyr wanted a flag uncluttered enough for a child to draw.

Saint-Cyr came up with a stylized, 13-pointed leaf. Reid suggested he whittle it down to the 11-point leaf that’s in the flag today.

The self-restraint practised by the designers appears to have worked, Reid says.

“With 11 points, we got it as far as we could in being straightforward, and still have the essence of a maple leaf,” Reid says.

“It’s the essence of simplicity.”

A BADGE OF HONOUR ON BACKPACKS

When backpackers from the world’s most powerful nation poach your flag, you can be pretty sure you’ve done something right.

For a half-century, tales have abounded about U.S. flag-jackers stitching Canada’s flag to their backpacks to enjoy the good will generated by the red maple leaf. Even Lisa Simpson of TV’s The Simpsons travels with one.

Vancouver’s Patrick Reid, who co-designed the flag in 1964, recalls seeing knapsacks stacked high each summer day at Canada House, home to Canada’s high commission to the United Kingdom, in London in the late ’70s.

“Every one had a maple leaf flag on it,” Reid says. “Some of the holders of those knapsacks were Americans.”

Simon Fraser University history professor Elise Chenier wonders whether travellers these days are quite as eager to sew the Canadian flag to their backpacks.

Canada’s former image as a friendly nation that protects the environment will be perceived by residents of some nations as being at odds with its foreign and domestic policies, Chenier says.

“It’s possible to say that there is now a greater likelihood of negative reaction to the Canadian flag in certain parts of the world than there might have been 20 years ago,” says Matthew Evenden, a geography professor who chairs Canadian studies at the University of B.C.

NATION DIVIDED OVER THE FLAG

A flag intended to unify Canada might have looked like a failure when it replaced the red ensign as Canada’s national symbol on Feb. 15, 1965.

The battle over the a flag had fractured the country, triggering waves of anger and bitterness.

Federal opposition leader John Diefenbaker, the new flag’s sworn enemy, wept in despair at the sight of the red-and-white cloth being hoisted over Parliament Hill 50 years ago.

Politicians and ordinary Canadians fought the idea of a new flag and fought about fine details of its design. Some opponents pointed out that a flag based on a maple leaf was a dumb idea in a country where the sugar maple doesn’t grow any further west than the Ontario-Manitoba border.

One-third to half of English Canadians were against the new flag, according to historian C. P. Champion. Among those were veterans who had fought under the red ensign.

Quebeckers, historian Allan Levine says, were more connected to the fleur-de-lys, which had been their province’s official flag since 1948.

B.C. Premier W.A.C. Bennett had expressed his opposition to an ­earlier version of the flag — the so-called Pearson pennant — that featured three maple leaves floating between two blue bars.

On Feb. 15, 1965, only four people — none of them MLAs — showed up for “the deliberately inconvenient” dawn hour of the new flag’s first raising in B.C., says flag historian Rick Archbold.

The country has rallied around the flag during the past 50 years. Canadians born after the poisonous flag debate of 1964 may have little idea of how much fuss the new flag sparked.

Some observers say the flag has a mixed record of binding the country together.

“The flag will always be a contested symbol,” Simon Fraser University history professor Elise Chenier says.

“For some Quebeckers, it may suggest a national unity that does not exist.

“First Nations people may see it as a symbol of colonialism.”

RUNNERS-UP TO THE MAPLE LEAF

From the federal government’s first bid to create a new flag in 1925 to the flag debate of 1964, Canadian citizens proposed thousands of designs.

In 1964, a flag committee of parliament considered some 5,900 designs.

Most featured a maple leaf as a key element.

But the maple leaf is not the only symbol of national unity. Designs poured in featuring animals such as Canada geese, grizzlies, moose, salmon, bison and caribou, flag historian Rick Archbold says.

One design showed a beaver wearing a Mountie hat, Archbold says in his book A Flag for Canada.

Still, the maple leaf was a tough symbol to beat. The Union Flag or its sister Red Ensign ­— a Canadian shield and Union Flag against a red background — had been Canada’s flags in war and peace since confederation. But many Canadian soldiers in both world wars wore the maple leaf on their regimental badges. Canadian athletes had long worn a maple leaf as part of their uniforms. At the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, Mo., many of the country’s first Olympic athletes wore a maple leaf insignia, Archbold says.

These were narrowed down to three: the so-called Pearson pennant featuring a three-leaved maple between blue borders; a red-and-white single leaf with 13 points (later changed to 11); and a complicated third design featuring a red maple leaf in the middle, bordered by three fleur de lys on one side and a Union Flag on the other.

In the end, 10 of the 14 committee members voted for the single red maple leaf flag.

NEW FLAG HICCUPS

When the new Canadian flag’s first official day arrived, there weren’t enough flags to go around.

A secondary-school student in Stayner, a small Ontario town near Collingwood, tackled the problem by gluing red cut-outs of the leaf and bars to a white bedsheet, flag historian Rick Archbold says.

“In some places, flags with a 13-pointed leaf were raised in error: these flags had been made in Japan by manufacturers who had jumped the gun before the 11-point design was final,” Archbold says.

CRITICISM IN QUOTES

Prime Minister Lester Pearson must have beamed with pride and relief as Canada’s new flag fluttered above Parliament Hill 50 years ago today. Pearson’s proposal for a Canadian flag had come under such withering fire in 1964 that it’s a wonder it survived at all.

Here are a few of the more acidic comments about various versions of the flag:

“Quebec does not give a tinker’s damn about the new flag. It’s a matter of complete indifference.”

— Pierre Trudeau, December 1964. The future prime minister was a University of Montreal law professor in 1964.

“The Pearson flag is a meaningless flag... It is a flag without a past, without history, without honour and without pride.”

— John Diefenbaker. These heavily underscored lines were discovered in Diefenbaker’s personal files.

“A stylized maple leaf is not a maple leaf at all.”

— Group of Seven artist A.Y. Jackson.

“It’s a poor, crowded design, with two of the leaves jammed down, making the corners look ragged.”

— Vancouver artist Jack Shadbolt wrote of the three-leaved “Pearson Pennant,” one of the flag designs under consideration.

CODES OF CONDUCT

Canada counts on you to be gentle to your flag.

Canada has never passed laws spelling out how its flag must be treated. In other words, if you get angry enough about an issue to burn the flag, you can’t be prosecuted.

Still, customs and codes of flag conduct have evolved over the decades. The operating rule is to treat the flag with dignity.

Don’t use the flag as a tablecloth or chair covering, Ottawa’s Canadian Heritage department says. Don’t mask boxes with the flag or use it as a barrier on a platform.

“When the national flag of Canada is raised or lowered, or when it is carried past in a parade or review, all present should face the flag, men should remove their hats, and all should remain silent,” Canadian Heritage says. “Those in uniform should salute.”

Canada’s flag takes precedence over the flag of any other nation when they’re flown in this country.

But Britannia still rules the flag waves. The personal standards of Britain’s royal family and the standards of the Governor General and the 10 Lieutenant-governors take precedence over the national flag.

When a Canadian flag becomes tattered and has reached the end of its life, “it should be destroyed in a dignified way,” Canadian Heritage says.

Burning it privately is one way to preserve a tattered flag’s dignity, flag experts say.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF FLAGS

The ancestors of today’s national flags were symbolic standards carried by ancient Egyptians, Assyrians and Jews.

In the medieval era, Europe fluttered with a bewildering variety of flags, including banners, standards and streamers.

“The Union Jack (or Union Flag) is formed by the crosses of St. George, St. Andrew and St. Patrick — the national saints, respectively, of England, Scotland and Ireland,” according to the Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia.

The fleur-de-lys flag was the main ­symbol of French power in North America from 1534, when explorer Jacques Cartier claimed the New World for France, until it ceded Canada to Britain in the early 1760s, the federal government’s Canadian Heritage department says.

Denmark has the world’s oldest, continuously used national flag, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. The design of a white Scandinavian cross on a red background was adopted in 1625 and its square shape in 1748. The Danes call it the “Dannebrog” or Danish cloth.

The annual 10-day event attracts thousands of people — riders and fans — to the mountain resort

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